I’ve been silent the last week, but that was primarily due to the intervention of the Thanksgiving holiday. Those three days right before the holiday’s start were filled with meetings to finalize or start reviews of several projects, a code freeze for the Braidwood experiment, and my initiation of an […]
I love physics. I’ve spent my past few weekends reviewing all those chapters on relativity in introductory physics textbooks that I had to rush through as a student, just to prep for the exam. I’ve mixed into that whitewashed view of special relativity Einstein’s original papers (translated) on the subject, […]
It kinda started back during the Protestant reformation, but it’s come back recently. The Catholic church has been weighing in over the last year on the roles of religion and science. Cardinal Shoenborn made the first overt rumblings in support of intelligent design as science back in July [TAOMPH73] [TAOMPH77], […]
I’ve been thinking a lot of late about what to say the next time I go to Washington. I seem to get there, one way or another, about twice a year these days. I don’t do it to sight-see, though Washington D.C. is “home to a rich and varied set […]
The continuum. It’s not an “organization of intergalactic intelligent designers whose purpose seems to be constant irritation of Jean-Luc Picard”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_%28Star_Trek%29. The continuum is the ultimate expression of quantum mechanics. It is what nature does with energy when it converts to mass: generate a continuous distribution of random particles whose production […]
I just got off the phone with Jodi, and she said it’s snowing in Minnesota. I WANT SNOW!!! Right now, this is the best I can manage:
Timely. NPR’s program “Soundprint today explored the story of ancient footprints uncovered in Africa, and how evolution is both denied and manipulated by politicians and theologians in South Africa to achieve their personal agendas”:http://soundprint.org/radio/display_show/ID/37/name/Footprints. This is an excellent illustration of just what happens when you couple the base states of […]
As I commented the last night, who could expect the Pope to do anything but come out in favor of Catholic doctrine? To better illustrate the fundamentalism, however, that he seems to have embraced, let’s contrast Cardinal Poupard’s measured reason with the Pope’s pop: Cardinal Poupard “But we also know […]
Bob Park “hits them all again in his column”:http://bobpark.physics.umd.edu/WN05/wn111105.html, “What’s New?”. As my father first brought to my attention, then as I saw in the news and now read in Bob’s column, Pat Robertson verbally intervened after the ousting of the Dover, PA schoolboard. After the voters in Dover taught […]
The new Kansas state board of education’s science standards state that “Science is a systematic method of continuing investigation that uses observations, hypothesis testing, measurement, experimentation, logical argument and theory building to lead to more adequate explanations of natural phenomena.” More adequate explanations? What does that mean? “Logical argument” is […]
Academic freedom is at the very core of all that I do. I have a great liberty in science, the liberty of thought. But the popular image of a physicist, that of Einstein in his old age, is quite misleading. Most of the physicists that I know do not spend […]
Now that we’re off daylight savings time, I leave work only to be greeting by a world cloaked, a thin veil of bright sky clinging to the ridgeline of the Santa Cruz mountains. Tonight, however, was just a little bit different. While we’ve been enjoying some cool, cloudly days this […]